The One Source Bob Woodward Can’t Get to Talk

Bob Woodward has published a book roughly every two years since the Watergate scandal, 24 in all. Taken together, they comprise a running narrative of almost every administration from Richard Nixon’s to Donald Trump’s. The genre of the Washington book—a sequence of scenes inside rooms where important things happen, based on a convention called “deep background,” with riches of information traced to no sources—is so familiar that it’s easy to forget that Woodward practically invented it. Decade after decade, he has kept turning up in the Oval Office, at Georgetown parties, on the doorsteps of government officials—always on the job, the hunt. His approach from across a crowded room or the sudden appearance of his name on a cellphone screen has surely sunk the heart of countless sources. And yet, though they know better, they always talk, as if transfixed by a predatory stare—like the frog that agrees to carry the scorpion on its back across the lake. “Why?” the frog cries as it drowns from the inevitable sting, to which the scorpion replies: “It’s my nature.”

Throughout most of Woodward’s career, several criticisms of his journalism have recurred: It provides little or no analysis; he’s a pawn of his sources, telling the story they want told; and he’s dangerous to talk to, because he privileges scoops above all else. These might seem to contradict one another, but in fact few people can survive stenography. Long quoted scenes stripped of context and meaning are almost always the cause of the damaging controversies in Woodward’s books. Once, during a panel on Iraq War reporting, the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh—perhaps the only comparable figure in American journalism, Mr. Outside to Woodward’s Mr. Inside—was asked what he thought of Woodward’s latest book about George W. Bush. The questioner was clearly baiting Hersh to denounce Woodward for shilling for the president. Instead, Hersh replied that he valued Woodward’s books because they reliably told him what was going on in the inner sanctum from which he and the rest of us were shut out.

Like clockwork over the course of half a century, a Woodward book has appeared and Washington has descended into a temporary frenzy, which sometimes even resulted in political change, not least the end of a presidency. If his many best sellers endure beyond their historical moment, their relevance will be as an epic court chronicle, a contemporaneous record of an age of almost unbridled presidential power. But as his work nears an end, his kind of journalism is seeing its influence disappear. The taboos that once shamed his subjects have fallen.

At 83, Woodward has had an important and interesting life, so why not write about it? But a memoir is a treacherous undertaking. “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful,” Orwell warned. It requires an unnatural ability and willingness to explore your own dark corners, failures, humiliations. Half a century of hunting for presidential secrets didn’t prepare Woodward to be his own quarry. In Secrets: A Reporter’s Memoir, he tells a few unflattering truths about himself—major stories he missed, friends he burned. But he doesn’t always grasp their full significance. Scrupulous with facts but famously unable or unwilling to reflect, he’s not a completely satisfying narrator of his own story.

The best pages of VIP memoirs tend to be the early ones, before fame has arrived and revelations stiffen and grow stale. Woodward opens Secrets with scenes of self-exposure likely to startle the many sources and powerful subjects who have often experienced him as cold-blooded, risky company. Woodward was the first child of a successful lawyer and his homemaker wife in mid-century Wheaton, Illinois, strictly Republican, devoutly Christian—the most staid beginning imaginable. But his mother was emotionally unstable and unfaithful, and his father repressed his unhappiness in constant work. The atmosphere of tension and evasion gave their son a sense that his world might fall apart (since childhood, Woodward has had an acute fear of house fires). Anxiety turned him into a searcher for hidden facts: “I became a snoop. I would pry into cabinets and bedside tables, nosing through the top drawer of my father’s dresser.” At 11, Bob discovered among his father’s socks a letter from his mother referring to “our divorce”—a topic they had kept from their son. At 16, working as a janitor in his father’s law office, Bob would pilfer and pore over files of legal cases and discover scandals involving townspeople he knew. “Everybody had secrets, I realized.”

This origin story explains why Woodward became not a lawyer, a professional keeper of confidences, as his father had expected, but instead a reporter who exposes them while preserving every scrap of paper that falls into his hands. To know things that others wanted to conceal gave him a sense of tenuous control in an unpredictable and dangerous world.

After Wheaton came Yale, then five unhappy years in the Navy. On duty as a custodian of nuclear authentication codes, Woodward acquired the permanent fear that a nuclear war could easily happen by accident. He talked his way out of a tour in Vietnam by disingenuously claiming that, as a true Navy man, he was eager to keep serving aboard a ship. Wanting to defer law school, he talked his way into a tryout at The Washington Post. He failed in “a spectacular crash” (the concept of attribution—of identifying who said what to a reporter—was unfamiliar to him), but the speed and intensity of newspaper work were captivating. He had found the love of his life, and a year of minor-league ball with the Montgomery County Sentinel showed that he was a fast learner. In the summer of 1971, in an act of nerve that became his signature, he called the Post’s metropolitan editor, Harry Rosenfeld, at home; got yelled at; and was given a second chance.

Woodward’s account of his apprenticeship evokes the intoxicating fun of becoming a reporter with the license to go anywhere and talk with anyone. The boyish anxiety that made him spy on his parents became a professional ferocity to find out everything he could about his subjects. Woodward’s technique combines a glutton’s appetite for material, a wooer’s zeal to win over sources, and a priest’s respect for the seal of confession. The identity of “Deep Throat,” Woodward’s underground-parking-garage informant during Watergate, remained unknown to the public for more than 30 years. He turned out to be a top FBI official named Mark Felt, whom Woodward had met by chance when he was still a young Navy lieutenant, waiting in the West Wing in 1970 to deliver Pentagon documents to Henry Kissinger’s office. Felt was there on his own errand (perhaps, Woodward now speculates, to discuss Kissinger’s illegal wiretaps of aides and journalists). They chatted, and Woodward, already driven to “grab on” to anyone in Washington who might be useful, asked Felt for his phone number before they parted.

The Watergate story remains an irresistible tale of youthful luck and courageous persistence. It was the first news story I ever followed closely, and whatever Woodward’s subsequent faults, to me he will always be one of the two heroes of journalism who uncovered the crimes that ended Nixon’s presidency. Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men is still exhilarating—tense, vivid journalism noir, told in the third person, featuring two young reporters as its central characters. According to Secrets, this literary inspiration came from Robert Redford, who began pursuing Woodward for a movie about the pair in the fall of 1972, when the Watergate break-in was only a few months old and its historic implications unknowable.

Much of the memoir’s Watergate section simply quotes or paraphrases familiar scenes from All the President’s Men; perhaps 50 years of perspective couldn’t improve on the original. Bernstein was the better writer, as a wry line in the book makes clear: “One office rumor had it that English was not Woodward’s native language.” Woodward the elderly memoirist, though, might have explored the difficult relationship that led to his reportorial breakup with Bernstein (with whom he remains personally close); instead, he says little more than “We disagreed a lot.” He’s just as reticent later about how he tried to reconcile fatherhood with nonstop work.

Being a journalist for Woodward “is not just a job but who I am,” which means that Secrets is largely an account, book by book, of how he goes about that job. Because he broke his biggest story and co-authored his best book at the very start of his career, Woodward faces the danger of a long anticlimax. His purpose in Secrets is to share “some of my favorite reporting stories,” but also to reveal sources long concealed under the cloak of deep background. His uncheckable approach has aroused considerable skepticism about some of his more noteworthy scoops. In part to answer critics, he discloses the identities of “secret sources” who are now dead, as well as of some who are still alive and have given him permission. To Woodward, a secret is inherently valuable if it’s in his possession, all the more if it’s his alone. But not every secret is equally interesting, and the importance of even the biggest tends to fade with time.

For example, Woodward devotes three chapters to his pursuit of William J. Casey, President Ronald Reagan’s longest-serving CIA director, for a book about the agency’s covert wars. When Veil was published, in 1987, it provoked an uproar over a scene that described Casey, on his deathbed, nodding when Woodward asked if he was implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal. How could Woodward have slipped inside the closely watched hospital room? It turns out that he’d befriended Casey’s security agents. Elsewhere, we learn that, in 1979, a Senate lawyer named Stephen Breyer paid a visit to Woodward’s Georgetown house and read a prepublication copy of The Brethren, Woodward and Scott Armstrong’s inside look at the Supreme Court—15 years before Breyer himself joined the Court. I don’t see how this qualifies as “another secret that has a certain historic value today,” but maybe you have to live in Georgetown.

What these reporting tales lack in perspective, they compensate for in self-portraiture of a tireless, sometimes shameless reporter with a remarkable knack for getting people to give him what they don’t want to give. During work on The Brethren, Woodward hunted down scores of Supreme Court clerks, among them one Steven P. Goldberg. Over lunch, Goldberg mentioned to Woodward that he had written a “case history” of the Court’s unanimous 1974 decision requiring Nixon to release the Watergate tapes. This was the sort of casual discovery that excited Woodward’s animal spirits: “What are you doing tonight?” Goldberg had plans, but he finally told Woodward he could come by for a 15-minute talk, which went on for hours, as Woodward deployed all of his skills: attentiveness, coaxing, a deceptively gentle barrage of questions, all while pushing the limits of common decency. “I need your help,” he implored—a frequent refrain, along with “This is for history.” Goldberg repeatedly refused to hand over the case history, but he ultimately agreed to read it aloud while Woodward took frantic notes, his hand cramping as he wrote down every detail about a surprisingly contentious argument among the justices, pressing whenever Goldberg wanted to stop.

At last Goldberg fell asleep in his chair. Woodward saw his opportunity. Giving a nudge and clearing his throat, he said that he would borrow the document for the night and return it in the morning. Goldberg “stirred and squinted up at me with clear annoyance and absolute exhaustion. Okay, he mumbled.”

Woodward tells this story of extreme methods with an engaging mix of pride and self-mockery—which is not the same thing as true self-knowledge. Even as we admire his astonishing work ethic and dedication to prying loose the last fact, we recoil at his manipulations. Woodward is a killer. Does he see himself that way? He describes his technique and purpose with the earnest naivete of a boy from Wheaton, writing at one point, “I believe my approach is straightforward and my manner forthright,” and at another, “For me journalism has always been about getting the public the best obtainable version of the truth.” Yes—but it’s also about self-aggrandizement. Woodward’s readers and some of his sources understand this better than he does, and because a memoir depends so much on honest self-scrutiny, this gap is more damaging than an incorrect fact.

[From the November 2026 issue: Thomas Mallon the literary ruses of Janet Malcolm]

Janet Malcolm famously described the journalist as “a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” Woodward comes closest to bearing out this portrayal in the book’s most revealing and disturbing section. Richard Darman was a powerful, now mostly forgotten White House official in the administrations of Reagan and George H. W. Bush. He and Woodward maintained a close friendship for almost 20 years, until the end of the Bush presidency. “Darman was my best friend and a source,” Woodward writes. And not just any source—“my crown jewel,” “a reporter’s dream source,” always ready to talk and full of information and insight. The pleasure they took in each other’s company was heightened by the uses to which they put each other—Darman’s leaks to Woodward serving his own bureaucratic machinations as well as Woodward’s hunger for insider grist—so that affection and self-interest seemed almost indistinguishable. But Woodward, more than Darman, never lost sight of which came first.

This arrangement suited both men until the 1992 presidential campaign. Darman gave Woodward details of Bush’s botched economic program—including how Darman had persuaded Bush to renege on his “Read my lips: no new taxes” pledge—for a book that wasn’t to be published until after the election. But Woodward decided to use the material for a four-part Washington Post series, in which he would employ his “best friend,” then Bush’s budget director, as not just an obvious source but a central subject. The series, now scheduled to appear before Election Day, was bound to damage Bush’s campaign. When Darman learned that Woodward planned to go back on his word and publish before the election, he realized that he had deceived himself about the nature of their relationship. He accused Woodward of violating his trust and, Woodward recalls, pointed out devastatingly that “writing about personal conflicts within Bush’s team is counter to the serious purposes I claim in my journalism.” We are a long way from high crimes and misdemeanors; Washington politics and journalism have become entertaining blood sport.

Woodward refused to budge, piously insisting on his “obligation to publish.” The series came out, Bush lost the election, and a friendship that had also been a web of conflicting interests ended. Darman continues to haunt Woodward, and he tells this story with regret and a degree of self-loathing—not so much for betraying someone he considered his best friend, but for never trying to make amends before Darman’s death, in 2008. Even here there is a limit to Woodward’s self-awareness. He can’t quite bring himself to acknowledge what Darman learned: that personal harm was not just a sad consequence of mistakenly mixing friendship with work; that this confidence game was a part of Woodward’s trade, driven by a not entirely public-spirited determination to have a big story that no one else did.

I’ve found it possible to forgive Woodward’s opaque sourcing, betrayals of trust, and credulousness, but not the other fault for which he’s indicted: bad writing. This turns out to be a perplexing one. In Secrets we learn that he can write well; he just seems to choose not to. After interviews, Woodward would go home and immediately draft detailed accounts. He quotes a number of these memos in the book, and they are invariably more perceptive and original than his published work. Here is his description of the power in Bill Clinton’s eyes: “Not just the eyeball which is active and expressive but his eyelid which does its own dance and twists oddly at times, sending its own message. He is very attentive. Even drinking a Coke, he keeps his eyes focused on me. Once even staring out through the bottom of his glass at me.”

Why don’t we get to read prose like this in Bush at War or Fear: Trump in the White House ? “I present all the facts,” Woodward tells us, “but I do not speculate about underlying or greater cosmic meaning.” This self-erasure—perhaps an effect of a repressed midwestern childhood, or an old-fashioned code of reporting, or the absence of Carl Bernstein—accounts for the missing analytical context and the narrative non sequiturs that turn Woodward’s later books into stitched-together interview transcripts.

Secrets shows a professional doing essentially one thing through a long and prolific career—the Nolan Ryan of journalism, with a better rookie year. Woodward has always been a barometer of power in Washington, including his own. The Washington book he did so much to enshrine mattered as long as it belonged to a world with standards of truth and codes of conduct. Now, with a president who announces his abuses of power on Truth Social, there are no norms left to be broken, no scandals to be covered up or exposed.

As for journalism, Woodward believes that truth will always matter, but “when there is already so much dirt all over, nothing sticks.” A book as deeply reported, elegantly constructed, and damning as Regime Change, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s account of Trump’s first year back in the White House, may be a best seller, but it can’t give readers, as Woodward’s earlier books did, the startling experience of privileged glimpses into the dark heart of politics. The powerful don’t care anymore, and perhaps most of the people don’t either. Woodward’s achievement depended on a society that was still capable of being shocked.

This article appears in the December 2026 print edition with the headline “The Scorpion.”